It is known to analyze business processes on the basis of digital trails (process protocols) in IT systems. The entirety of process steps stored in an IT system results in a process which can automatically be reconstructed and analyzed.
The analysis usually is not performed in the source systems (e.g., the ERP system), but rather in a data base separate from the source systems. The data is extracted from the source systems, the extracted data is transformed, and the transformed data is stored in a data base. The analysis of the processes is then carried out on the data stored in this data base.
With respect to the methods known from prior art, it is disadvantageous, for example, that the analysis possibilities on the basis of the data generated by the instances of the real process (process instance protocols) are restricted with respect to flexibility, the performance, as well as the possibility of analyzing arbitrarily complex, potentially parallel processes. Only predefined analyses can be carried out. The analysis of very complex parallel processes is imprecise, and the performance of the algorithms is not sufficient for processing very large data sets having several hundred millions of process instances.